Friday, 8 April 2011

Pornokitsch Gives You... Anno Mortis!

Hey all,

As you probably remember, the fine folk at Pornokitsch.com have spent all week bringing you the best, worst and most interesting of Romeiana... Romana?... Romanesque?... stuff about Romans, in their week-long feature, "V Days of Rome."

It's gone brilliantly well, as near as I can tell, with loads of blogposts, reviews, an enormous interview with Sophia McDougall, and competitions and giveaways on their Facebook page. So very well done, Anne and Jared. It's been a blast.

Anyway, today they have a spate of Anno Mortis-related shenanigans! There's the downloadable free sample already mentioned (it's Chapter Sixteen, by the way, with all the zombies and zombie tigers and chariots and stuff), a review of the book (actually, kind of a re-review, since as Jared points out it was one of the first books they reviewed, back in the day), and until midnight tonight you can win a signed first edition of the book on their Facebook page by answering the question, "What caused the fall of Rome?"

Check their shiznit izout.

The book comes together in a complex mash-up of classical mythologies that, in my case, really did benefit from a re-read. If the "what" (zombies) is unveiled early in Anno Mortis and the "how" (evil bugs) soon follows, the "why" is kept a tight secret until the final pages. There are a lot of players involved, both mortal and immortal, and it takes an explosive chain of conclusions to reveal them all. Needless to say, the stakes are not only much higher than just Rome, but also more personal. What a god wants, the whole world may have to give.

To freely lift from my own original conclusion: "All said and done, Anno Mortis is a massively entertaining - and oddly educational - romp. From sieges to orgies; tigers to chariot races; it pulls out all the stops in providing unceasing fun." And as a footnote, Anno Mortis isn't just another chapter in a passing fad. Good pulp is timeless, and this pulp is very, very good indeed.